Experimental Comics Narratives

Thoughs and observations from workshops in the classroom and assignments from the course Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.
During the years I have been working with the course Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, I have tried different ways of encouraging students to take steps towards a more experimental approach to the narratives they create. Most students are really interested in comics but have a limited oeuvre. I felt that the stale and very basic storytelling techniques the students used were not only limited, but also limiting them in what kind of stories they could tell. The better we know a language the better we can use it to tell stories, and this goes for the language of comics as well. One obstacle that makes this outcome hard to reach is the time span, the course is 30 hp, thus only half a year in length. You can come to learn more advanced techniques of storytelling by reading a lot of comics, but the students can’t possibly read that much during the short time we have.
I have used three different methods to encourage them to use experimentation as a way to explore new and different kinds of storytelling: 1) by bringing them advanced comics to read and then discussing them in the classroom, 2) by cutting and pasting in basic comics so that the students physically move the frames and thus change the story, 3) by letting them follow the proto-history, pre-history and history of comics and giving them assignments where they get to try different styles and fashions from the history of visual storytelling.
All three of these ways produced results, the most long-lasting of which was the history assignments.
In my presentation I will discuss the observations I made in the classroom during these exercises and my thoughts about their outcome.

The paper looks at experiments on narrative forms that partly challenge and even change our understanding of what "comics" are and what might be described as mixed media storytelling.
Not only digital comics but also analogue forms constantly experiment on and expand formal and narrative options, partly including elements of other narrative media, partly developing other forms of presenting sequential visual storytelling on paper. The growing bandwidth of forms results in growing options to use comics for: not only fictional but also non-fictional issues are communicated more and more in comics formats.
It is our experience that students who take comics courses are experts on only a small section of the existing comics' uses. They neither are familiar with the full bandwidth of uses nor with the narrative possibilities that rest in the elements of comics. Experimenting with the formal and narrative options systematically does constantly widen their understanding of the potential of comics and their ability to apply this knowledge. Based on a few examples that develop comics further, the benefits of interlinking theory and praxis in comics-education are reflected on critically.

Note:

Comics: production and institution Despite many dire predictions about the fate of the comics industry, it continues to prosper and has increasing cultural influence, particularly in the fields of film and the games industry. National boundaries are increasingly less important for example with the spectacular international rise of manga. However, national production and distribution practices have historically been important in the narratives, audiences and cultural capital attached to comics (eg: European comics,Bande Dessinée compared with American comics). In academic terms it has never been more important with the two new journals, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge) andStudies in Comics (Intellect), adding to the burgeoning interest in comics from a huge and varied range of perspectives.
The theme of this conference incorporates comics production as part of but also outside of institution. Comics are unique in the mass media because the individuals who produce and distribute the products are usually fans: from creators to comics shops owners and comicon organisers. So we are inviting papers on all aspects of production: from the multinationals and media conglomerations to small scale production such as fanzines and independent presses. Related aspects of the industry are also of interest, for instance censorship and copyright issues, promotional practices (comicons, comics distribution, historical practices eg: the change in distribution from newsagents to comics shops to collecting and comics promotion).

This paper considers potential ways comics narratives with a documentary claim can participate in the academic discussion of history. Academic historiography constructs (normally literal, mainly text based) arguments about historical events through discussions of (often written) sources, with reference to and in dialog with other relevant positions (Evans, 2012). While comics narration and imagery does not conform to the conventions of academic historiography, we are interested in the possibility of a mutually beneficial dialog between the arguments, and the ways they are manifested, in certain comics narratives and the ones that constitute the academic discourse of history. The following analysis focuses on a precondition for such dialog: the utilization of sources, and the explanation of how these sources are used to the readers, in comics that claim to reliably portray and explicate aspects of historical reality . As case studies, we look into four different approaches to historical comics: two graphic novels, one chapter in a comics anthology, and an archaeological paper in comics format. We will investigate their particular ways of informing readers about research methods that were employed for preparing the story, and about the provenience of archival materials that were, directly or indirectly, quoted in the comics. An integral part of the historical argument that these works make respectively involves reflections on the attempt to understand reality; we will discuss at how these attempts are communicated, to evaluate their adherence to the expectations of academic historiography.

The paper looks at abstract meaning or references in comics to understand better the limitations for comics’ storytelling that might result from using higher forms of abstraction. The central question in this regard is, under what conditions the reading of sequentiality into juxtaposed images stops working. By looking at the related details of several examples, the features necessary for making images become a comic are reflected on.
The narration of a comic is given in its sequence of images, in the interweaving of representations of forms. In a comics-context, the concept of formal or narrative abstraction could be understood as a lack of connections between the images. This is in essence the quality that has been described as ”non-sequitur” by McCloud (1993). But non-sequitur does not exist, really. Readers always construct meaning into sequences of images.